One or Two or Six Christmas Markets

Vienna has the market on,well - Christmas Markets. It seems like everytime we turned a corner, we happened upon a Christmas Market. For those of you that are uninitiated, a Christmas Market is sort of like a farmers' market with loads of stalls selling items, except the items are usually crafts, or food or have something to do with Christmas. As you can probably guess, I LOVE Christmas Markets. My family? Not so much. So I have to bribe them - sweet things for the children and alcoholic things for the husband.

At almost every important site in Vienna, the various palaces, the town hall, the gothic church, there is a Christmas Market in front. Some of them are bigger than others, the biggest one we went to was in front of the town hall. These are pictures of the town hall. It was decorated like an advent calendar. Each window had a number on the front and each day they revealed a different picture behind the number. It was beautiful and my photos don't do it justice. And yes, that is snow in the photos! It is a nice way to spend an evening, you wander from stall to stall. We bought a few ornaments for what is fast becoming our very international Christmas tree.




Here is one more picture of the City Hall in the day time that I think gives a better perspective on the market and the advent calendar windows.





This tree had the most amazing little lights in them, some Santa Clauses (?) some packages and I think some Christmas candy. The park in front of city hall was just filled with these lighted trees.

Of course we also had to stop numerous times to test out some of the treats available, sausages, pretzels, potato things (we were not quite sure what they were other than they were fried and good!) I think Chizz's favorite thing (and who am I kidding mine too) was the different kinds of warm drinks you could buy.

As I mentioned before, each major site in Vienna had its own Christmas market. Some of the markets were bigger,some sold slightly different merchandise or food but they all sold hot drinks. Hot chocolate, hot apple cider, hot mulled wine, hot apple alcholic punch, all kinds of hot alcholic punch or punsch as they say. Each Christmas market had its own colored mug. For a 2 euro deposit (about $3) you got a mug and you could go from booth to booth and buy different kinds of punch or wine. At the end of your visit, you could return the mug and get your 2 euros back. Or not. We loved the drinks and sometimes we returned the mugs and sometimes, we did not. How much did we love the warm drinks? You be the judge.

And these were just the mugs we kept!! Oh well, when in Vienna. . .